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Free speech at our secular universities is in danger. That’s probably not news to anyone who is alert to the trend. Conservatives, in particular, are under attack whenever they are slated to speak on campuses. They get shouted down and violence is often threatened.

One of the best organizations dealing with this threat is Young America’s Foundation (YAF). It works to place influential conservative speakers on those campuses to help students get an alternative viewpoint—all too often, they are treated to progressive, Marxist indoctrination in the classroom without other options.

This past week, one of YAF’s sponsored speakers, Ann Coulter, faced a possible uproar for her scheduled event at UC Berkeley, which is hardly the campus that comes to mind if one thinks of balanced perspective in higher education.

I used to appreciate Coulter’s boldness, but she seems to have morphed into a complete provocateur in recent years, looking more for a fight than illuminating truth. The last straw for me, honestly, was her latest book, In Trump We Trust. Amongst all the fine speakers YAF sends to campuses, she is at the bottom of my list, and I wonder why she is still on theirs.

Nevertheless, the threats against her were real. There is controversy over who actually called off the event, but Coulter came out of it angry at YAF, for some silly reason. It’s as if she wanted confrontation that would lead to violence. I have little sympathy for her approach.

Yet that doesn’t excuse the university officials who have apparently lost control of the student agitators who want only speech they agree with. We have reached, in my view, a tipping point in higher education. Parents need to think more seriously about where they are sending their almost-adult children for college degrees.

It’s become all too easy to make fun of this current generation of college kids:

Given the drift of our culture away from its Biblical roots, things may only get worse on campuses. Don’t think we’ve hit rock bottom just yet.

All this controversy only intensifies my commitment to Christian higher education. Yes, I know there’s a lot wrong on evangelical campuses; progressive tendencies pop up there as well. But professors like me who attempt to bring their Biblical principles into the classroom and apply them to history, government, and the culture are not silenced. We still have a voice.

After what I’ve experienced in some of Christian higher education, I sometimes joke that it is one of God’s minor miracles that I still believe in it. Yet that’s just the point: God is still in the business of performing miracles. I will remain faithful in my calling and hope He can use me and others to help whatever students He has placed in our care to see the world through the principles He has established.

As a university professor, I’m naturally interested in keeping up with the times. As I survey the climate of campuses throughout our nation, I’m beginning to realize I’m truly out of step. Perhaps I need to change some things to fit better into that current climate.

As a start, maybe I can alter my courses so they won’t be so focused on learning actual facts from history and evaluating the various interpretations of those facts in light of a Biblical worldview. And I probably should make my courses more fun, right? What could possibly go wrong with that innovative approach?

Neither should I be so adamant about correcting students’ writing or be so concerned about their grasp of fundamentals. This is a new age, after all:

I am a professor of history. I live, eat, drink, and breathe my profession. I see it as a calling from God. He provided His Word and the principles from His Word to guide me into my thinking about history, government, culture, and anything associated with those subjects.

I love teaching. I love reading/researching. I’ve even learned to love writing, which is the hardest of those loves to carry out effectively. Yet the love of God and His truths is what inspires me to do them all.

There’s one aspect of the calling He’s given me that’s not as easy to love as the others: grading.

Wouldn’t it be easier just to interact with students and enjoy the learning that takes place without all of the time-consuming grading? Yes, that would be nice. But it wouldn’t work.

I know from experience that even some of the best students won’t read the books assigned unless there is some kind of evaluation that follows afterward. Love of learning purely for the love of learning resides in the hearts of the few, not the many.

For instance, when I first taught a Civil War class to a group of history majors, I set it up in such a way that one of the students would be responsible each class session for making a presentation about the reading assignment while another had to come up with questions about the reading for the class to discuss.

My assumption was that, since they were history majors and ostensibly in the class because they wanted to learn about the Civil War, that they would eagerly read and discuss. What I found instead is that only two of the students were prepared for each class session: the one given the task to make the presentation and the one chosen to come up with questions.

The rest of the students were ignorant of the facts that were to be part of the discussion because they hadn’t read the assigned pages. After all, they didn’t have to make a presentation or come up with questions.

Needless to say, I don’t conduct my classes in that way anymore.

That’s why we must give assignments. That’s why we must grade those assignments. It’s a matter of accountability and a way to teach personal responsibility. Most won’t learn much of anything without those assignments.

Those assignments don’t teach students only; they also teach me personal responsibility. As much as I don’t like being bogged down by grading, the Lord keeps nudging me about why I must do that. It not only holds students accountable and makes them better people—it does the same for me.

So, as I enter this final month of the semester, I will try to keep that in mind. God wants me to do the best for my students by offering honest evaluations of their work and helping them to improve their thinking and writing.

He also wants me to improve my attitude toward all that grading; He’s using it to make me more like Him.

Chip away at my rough edges, Lord. Although I may not always enjoy the time I spend grading, I know I need You to continue to shape me more into the image of Christ.

Today I complete my 66th orbit of the sun. Do I become reflective when this annual event transpires? Absolutely. There’s a difference, though, between being reflective and being obsessed with introspection. We are to examine ourselves—our motives and actions before God and others—but that’s a daily thing. This annual reflection is not the same.

First, it’s a matter of gratitude to the Lord for another year passed and for the good things that have happened during that year. Were there bad things? Well, of course; that’s a part of life as well. But I don’t want to dwell on those.

What stands out to me on this day is how the Lord rescued me from my own self-destructive tendencies and allowed me to be used by Him to help impact the thinking and the character of college students. That’s been my ministry now for twenty-eight years, and despite some of the heartaches along the way, it’s a blessing that the positive things come to mind more readily than the negatives.

For me, it’s always been the relationship with students that keeps me going because I believe that’s God’s primary goal for my life: influence them as much as I can while I can.

So many memories of class times, informal get-togethers, trips, etc., crowd into my mind. Here are just a few I want to share.

A trip to Plymouth, Massachusetts, that culminated with a stop at the grave of William Bradford:

One of the annual excursions I used to make with students when I lived in Virginia, such as this Jamestown visit:

Once, a small group accompanied me throughout the Northeast, incorporating Plymouth, the Boston Freedom Trail, Philadelphia, and Mt. Vernon, to name just a few of the places we passed through:

Commencements at Regent University were always special:

Once, at Patrick Henry College, a graduating senior decorated my office door in commemoration of all the tissues she used while crying in that office:

At Southeastern, I hosted a Reagan Movie Night once. It was memorable:

Students also came to the house to watch a BBC production about C. S. Lewis. They stayed and talked afterwards—a relaxed evening. I’m glad they felt like they could hang around:

How many professors can claim to have taught three brothers, all of whom were history majors? We had a reunion last year:

For a couple of years, I was able to connect Southeastern with my former life in Virginia when I traveled to Williamsburg and showed students the historic sites. They came down to Lakeland last year and desired a “family” photo, so to speak:

I remember fondly a trip to Israel and Britain with Regent students—a trip none of us will ever forget (for great and not-so-great reasons). It was a bonding experience.

I remember fondly my great surprise when Patrick Henry students presented a gift to me at the end of one of the chapel services: the complete collection of Calvin and Hobbes comic strips. Those who know me know why that was a special gift.

Yes, I could go on for quite a while.

How much longer will I have this ministry? My standard joke is that as long as someone can wheel me into the classroom and I have my remote control to show my PowerPoint slides, I can still do this.

God gave me a calling. I will remain faithful to it until He says it’s time to move on. Today I’m just reflecting on the blessings of His calling.

I’ll probably do something like this again when I complete my 67th orbit.

Many readers of Lewis are familiar with a comment he made in his “Learning in War-Time” essay with respect to the importance of knowing history. As a historian, it truly resonates with me, and I was reminded of it again when I assigned the essay to my students last week. Lewis wrote,

Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. Not that the past has any magic about it, but because we cannot study the future, and yet need something to set against the present, to remind us that the basic assumptions have been quite different in different periods and that much which seems certain to the uneducated is merely temporary fashion.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village; the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age.

In other words, we need perspective—historical perspective—to properly understand our own time and to, as he says, make us somewhat immune to the “cataract of nonsense” that emanates from our media. In Lewis’s day, that was mostly via magazines and radio; what would he say about the vast social media networks that exist now?

I have The Quotable Lewis, a very useful volume edited by Wayne Martindale and Jerry Root, in front of me right now, and under the category of “Prejudice,” I discover that Lewis said something very similar in his Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature in a chapter on the poet Edmund Spenser. Here’s how he described the same concept in somewhat different language:

There is a great difference between rejecting something you have known from the inside and rejecting something (as uneducated people tend to do) simply because it happens to be out of fashion in your own time.

It is like the difference between a mature and travelled man’s love for his own country and the cocksure conviction of an ignorant adolescent that his own village (which is the only one he knows) is the hub of the universe and does everything in the Only Right Way.

For our own age, with all its accepted ideas, stands to the vast extent of historical time much as one village stands to the whole world.

A key message I always want to communicate to my students is that just because we are farther along the historical timeline, that doesn’t automatically mean we are smarter. Sometimes, the things we believe and the actions we take are more foolish than the beliefs and actions of those who came before us, and that it might be wisdom on our part to study them and find out what they have to offer us.

We are an arrogant age, thinking we know so much better than our ancestors, yet we are also a historically ignorant age. We have much to learn.

In my last post, I critiqued the current campus scene in colleges and universities nationwide and extolled the virtues of evangelical colleges. While not walking back that endorsement, I do want to point out that as long as we are on this earth, nothing is perfect, and that applies to evangelical institutions of higher education as well.

Some evangelicals seem to have some kind of inferiority complex because of their affiliation with a Christian college. They continue to look at what they consider to be prestigious universities as the epitome of higher education and strive to be acceptable to them intellectually. Let’s be honest: since the only places you can get many doctoral degrees are at those institutions, some Christian professors teaching at evangelical colleges may consider themselves to be second-rate because of that affiliation.

I disagree, of course, because I think all true learning begins with the knowledge of God and His ways. But I have seen an envy of sorts pop up in a number of colleagues over the years.

I’ve also seen an uncritical acceptance of trendy thought patterns. Every evangelical college has its quota, it seems, of social justice warriors who mirror the policies promoted by “progressive” forces in the secular world. In one sense, I understand how this can happen. Christians care for the poor; they see a need to help; they then adopt the clichés and attitudes of the Left who, to them, appear to be as concerned for the poor as they are.

Never mind that progressive, socialist policies have only hurt the poor wherever they are tried. They then label anyone who disagrees with such policies as uncaring, greedy, and unrighteous. And they have to ignore the incipient totalitarianism of the progressive Left that shouts down anyone with a different point of view and seeks to force conformity.

Personally, I have experienced what it means to be in the crosshairs of a Christian university administration when I have challenged certain trendy movements. At one of the universities where I taught, I was called into the academic dean’s office to answer for my teaching “heresies.”

What offenses did I commit? Well, first of all, I held to the Biblical view that parents are the ones who should decide how their children are educated, not the government. For advocating private schools and homeschooling, I was going against the university’s goal of placing students in public schools.

I never said that Christians shouldn’t be teaching in those schools as missionaries; I was merely stating that parents should take their educational responsibilities seriously and make sure their own children were brought up in the faith.

For that, I was a heretic, I guess.

The second teaching that got me into trouble was my concern over how much of modern psychology had found its way into Christian psychology and counseling. In particular, I questioned the emphasis on self-esteem because I see it as an artificial, self-centered approach that denies the true Christian message of recognition of sin and repentance prior to salvation. I believe that movement has done great damage in the church.

Then I had the audacity to put those views in a book. Apparently, that was the final straw. For those two reasons, I was told my contract would not be renewed. The book was an attempt on my part to help Christians understand the Biblical grounds for government and public policy, as I came to realize that the main reason some Christians drifted into progressive policies is that they don’t have a firm grasp of Biblical principles as applied to government.

While having my contract ended stung at the time, God opened another door that was far more fruitful. I have learned through experiences like this that I should never despair because He always has something for His people to do.

That old maxim that says when one door closes, another opens, is accurate when you believe that God works all things together for good for those who love Him.

So what am I saying? Be discerning. Not all advertisements for Christian education tell the whole story. Dig deeper and know what is being taught before sending your 18-year-old off to college. Avoid the heartbreak of seeing your children adopt views that run counter to the Biblical foundation you have tried to instill within them.

I’ve been following events on our nation’s campuses where higher learning is supposed to take place. From one perspective, one could say the faculty and students have performed a great service for making the nation laugh again, what with their “safe spaces” and tears over the last election.

However, my desire for higher learning to be appreciated makes the spectacle more a reason for sadness than laughter. Denying conservative speakers the right to be heard is a type of fascism, which is ironic because the deniers claim to be combating fascism. Their totalitarianism is fascistic; the speakers hold to limited government and the right for every position on the issues to be aired publicly.

The fascists are the student protesters; those who value liberty, decency, and civil discussion are the conservatives who are being shouted at and slandered.

I sit in a fairly “safe space” of my own since I teach on a Christian evangelical campus. I have yet to witness a riot on my campus, and people are allowed to speak without being shouted down. Each year, I bring a speaker for Constitution Day who extols the virtues of our form of government and the Christian basis for understanding government.

If you want to find where higher education is occurring, may I suggest a campus like mine? I invite all potential history majors to come and study under me and others who grasp the importance of Christian faith to education.

I have experienced other campus scenarios, however. Both my master’s and doctoral degrees were earned at typical secular universities. Some of what I received was excellent; some was biased. I learned to tell the difference.

For a few years, I even taught as an adjunct history professor at a large, well-known university in Virginia. I brought my Christian perspective into the classroom, along with my conservative political interpretation of American history. Course evaluations from my students were an affirmation that they believed I was a good professor.

Then I had a class in which one student, a radical feminist, complained to the department chair about my teaching. That led to a phone call from the chair (I never met her in person). She asked about how I teach and I told her. She seemed very civil and even noted that every professor teaches from his/her own perspective. I thought the conversation went very well.

I was never invited back.

The open mind is always closed at one end. That’s what Whittaker Chambers said about his mother when he asked her once about when God created the universe. She froze, he related, and in an icy voice, informed him that someone must have told him that, and that he was to keep an open mind. She then lectured him that the universe was created out of gases, not by God.

He learned a lot at that moment; that’s when he realized that those who proclaim to be so open are often the most close-minded.

That’s what we see at this moment on our campuses, and it’s a sad reality. Of course, I know this is not new. I was on a campus myself as a student during the Vietnam War. That era was ripe with protest, potential anarchy, and violence.

As has often been noted, the radicals of the 1960s-1970s are now teaching the current generation. The cycle continues. Back in my college days, the mantra was not to trust anyone over thirty. Only the younger generation really knew what to believe.

The more time passes, the less things change. That arrogance is still the cornerstone of radical protest today. They walk in blindness. The Christian mission on campuses is to shed light on that blindness and lead them into true Truth.